A Law unto Itself

Overview

A Law unto Itself is the first full-scale investigative book on the Internal Revenue Service. David Burnham, a distinguished reporter honored for his probing work on major bureaucracies such as the New York City Police Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Security Agency, now has penetrated the largest, most pow­erful and least accountable of all U.s. law enforcement agencies.

The size of the IRS alone is mind-­boggling, and its reach is little under­stood. Twice as big as the CIA and five times larger than the FBI, the IRS controls more information about more Americans than any other gov­ernment agency. Through its unique power to give and take away tax exemptions, its unequaled authority to seize property and its unparalleled access to financial records, the IRS has become the nation’s single most powerful instrument of social control.

Burnham lucidly explains how the IRS came to be so powerful. He describes the way the IRS actually processes tax returns, selects individ­ual taxpayers for audit and operates one of the most efficient collection agencies in the world-and the meth­ods the IRS uses to obtain billions of pieces of financial information and computerizes them to spin a complex web of data around every taxpayer. He also shows how seemingly small administrative errors by the agency often escalate into situations where millions of taxpayers each year are left enraged, frustrated and-too fre­quently-seriously and improperly damaged in a financial way.

The agency pays lip service to protecting taxpayers’ files against improper use, but tax information has been leaked many times in order to undermine the careers of politicians and others who have criticized it. Burnham reveals dozens of stories about the way the IRS, sometimes at the bidding of presidents and other times on its own initiative, has in­volved itself in many different social and political issues: working to slow the civil rights movement of the 1960s, going after religious fundamen­talists and seeking to prevent the development of public interest law firms dedicated to improving the environment.

Such vast power has not gone un­-corrupted. A Law Unto Itself exposes many cases of bribery, corruption, big-time financial fixes and improper political activities, suggesting that both the internal management and external oversight of the IRS are grossly inadequate.

Burnham’s absorbing portrait of this giant presence in American life is substantiated at every point by court documents, detailed statistics, case histories, congressional hearings, candid interviews, confidential inter­nal audits and official investigative reports.